By Justin Duckham-Talk Radio News Service House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) claimed during a press conference Thursday that if the economic recovery efforts were placed in the hands of Congressional Republicans, at least twice as many jobs would have been created. “Our projections...would be that we would have created twice as many jobs, at half the cost. Given the fact that unemployment continues to rise, we probably could have created ten times as many jobs as [Congressional Democrats] have.” Boehner claimed that he had based the conclusion off the same method the White House is currently using to compose their statistics. The House Minority Leader warned that the upcoming health care reform will contribute to further job loss. “This isn’t hard to figure out. When you raise the cost of employment...you get less employees. There’s no question that their proposal raises the costs of employers to have employees, because it requires all employers to have health care,” Boehner explained. The Department of Labor recently released a report showing that 9.5% of Americans are currently unemployed. Boehner also attacked Congressional Democrats’ management of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “16 million of the stimulus money was appropriated to take care of the salt marsh harvest mouse,” said Boehner, who appeared alongside a picture of the endangered rodent based in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) district. “People a hundred miles away have farms that are drying up because they wouldn’t use any stimulus money to turn on the pumps.”